LIFEGUARD Ultra Violence / Appetite 7” EP (Matador)

Whenever they have the time to do it (can’t be easy these days), Chicago’s Lifeguard continues to make a brash and uncompromised modern music that, since their inception, has been “getting weird with it” across some fifty years of recorded history, sawing off their peers and setting all three of their engines ablaze. This new single – two proper songs, two dub versions with a JD/Ian sort of haunt, and seven interstitials combine for an experience that centers as it pulls away and apart. But let’s get to the song of songs, “Appetite,” stitching together the Swell Maps and Stef Petticoat with a sense of crooked, key-shifting purpose, confidently tumbling to the end of what might be their best song yet in under two and a half minutes. “Ultra Violence” nearly edges it with bright stinging guitar, aloof/echoplexed vocals and breathless chorus, sounding like a volunteer army retreating Ramon the gator deeper into the sewer with pots and pans. The sweepings and clatter of the remaining tracks only serve to deepen the mystery, but by putting 20-second bursts of percussion and organ thrown down the stairs melee on the same footing as their songs, Lifeguard let us know that even their scraps stand as part of the whole, nothing wasted. All part of figuring this whole thing out.

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